A Case Study On English Teachers' Responses To Students' Answers In Primary School

With the further development of the Curriculum Reform of the Elementary Education in China, more and more teachers have begun to pay close attention to promote their classroom teaching efficiency by conducting some researches on the teachers' questioning and answering behaviors and skills in classroom. For the teachers'response to students'answers (TRSA), as one of the four important questioning and answering parts of the teachers' classroom interactive behaviors (questioning students-awaiting students' response?calling students to answer?responding to students'answers), has influenced the English teaching efficiency to a certain degree, thus, it becomes more and more important for teachers to understand and study the topic. The appropriate TRSA can stimulate students'interests, make them think positively, and create an atmosphere in which students can explore and acquire knowledge actively and develop the harmonious relationship between the teachers and students.In view of this, the author chooses the class TRSA behaviors of primary English teachers as her study focus. The study has lasted for three months from October to December in the year of 2015. The research subjects are the four teachers and their students chosen from Grade 3 to Grade 6 of Changgang Primary School in Changzhi City. The author conducts her research by the instruments of the classroom observation, the questionnaire survey and the interview. She chooses three lessons of each subject teacher randomly as the sample lessons to observe, and totally she has observed the four subjects'class lessons for 42 times during the period of her study. The author adopts Xiang Yang's classification of TRSA and rebuilds the observation scale to observe and record the application frequencies of the concrete TRSA behaviors of the research subjects. Then the interview is applied to explore the inner thought of the teachers'TRSA behaviors. At the same time, the questionnaire survey is carried out to investigate the application of TRSA behaviors from students'perspective. By doing so, the author tries to deal with the following three research questions:1. What are the main categories of TRSA that English teachers apply most in primary school?2. Is there any difference of the application of TRSA behaviors in different grades? If there is, what is it?3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the application of TRSA behaviors in primary school?After summing up the results of the application of the teachers'TRSA behaviors, the author finds out that the primary English teachers apply the Verbal TRSA behaviors in a high frequency. To be more concrete, they apply the Diagnostic, the Incentive TRSA most of time. As to the difference of the application of TRSA behaviors in different grades, the proportion of the Verbal TRSA has an increasing tendency with the grade rising; however, the proportion of the Nonverbal TRSA shows a decreasing tendency instead. As to the Developmental TRSA, Grade 3 has the lowest proportion of the total relevant behaviors. About the application of the Reaction TRSA, Grade 3 also has the largest percentage of the total behaviors, but Grade 6 just presents the opposite condition, which indicates that there are more TRSA behaviors in the lower-grade classes than the upper-grade classes. Moreover, the advantages of teachers' TRSA behaviors include:(1) Teachers approve of the TRSA behaviors. (2) Teachers are good at doing self-reflection on TRSA behaviors. (3) Teachers have the abilities of improvisation. (4) Teachers respect the right of students to express their views in class. While the disadvantages include the following five points:(1) Teachers lack deep understanding of TRSA. (2) There is a great deal of difference in the application of all types of TRSA. (3) Teachers'TRSA language has the feature of the stylization and formulation. (4) Teachers' TRSA behaviors are deeply influenced by their presupposition for the answers. (5) The Nonverbal TRSA is still not sufficient in class. At last, five pieces of the reasonable suggestions were also given correspondingly.To be brief, although this research has gained some positive effects, however, there are some limitations that need to be improved:First, the subjects of the observation should be enlarged. Second, the duration of the research should be expanded. Third, the instruments of the research should be improved. Finally, the level of the theories and researching ability of the author should also be enhanced.